 I'm going to get started. Can everybody hear me? OK. So we're going to be talking about community involvement, bettering yourself, and preparing yourself to speak at a word camp or a local meetup. So first off, I'm Mike Hansen. I work at Bluehost. I work on the open source team at Bluehost. I'm a WordPress core contributor, a word camp organizer, and a local meetup organizer in Utah, Salt Lake City. So this is coming from a few different perspectives of my various experiences. And all of these are just tips, not hard rules. And I hope everybody gets something from it. So first of all, I want to talk about why you should get involved with your local community. Can I see a raise of hands? How many people attend their local WordPress community? OK. Yeah, the meetup. OK, how many people have ever presented at that meetup? OK, a few less hands. OK. There's a lot of reasons you should be active in your local meetup group. And we're just going to talk about a few obvious ones, but we're also going to talk about a few that aren't so obvious. So the giant one is you want to learn. You go and there's a topic you're interested in. And you want to learn more about that topic. So you go to learn. Is that right? OK, there's a lot of other ways to learn at a meetup. And one of those is that you can, if you're not interested in the topic, I suggest you go anyways. But I think you should talk to an organizer when you're there and let them know what you expect and what you want to learn. Organizers greatly appreciate that kind of feedback, and they will happily try to find a speaker to accommodate that. Get out of the house. If you guys are like me, I get comfortable at home, right? And it's good for everyone to get out of the house and go socialize a little bit, check out your meetup, and just meet some new people. Sometimes a lot of us are introverts, and it's hard for us to get out and go to a meetup or go to an event like this. And so I would just encourage everybody to get a little out of your comfort zone and go do that. If it makes you a little uncomfortable, do it anyways. It's really good. One great thing about WordPress communities and WordPress meetups is that everybody already has one thing in common, and that's WordPress. And we want to learn something about WordPress. We want to do something about WordPress. We love it, or we use it, or that. So everybody knows something about WordPress. So when you're at a meetup, you might be there to see the topic, learn about the topic at hand, but you're also there to meet the other people who are going. You're going to meet a lot of great people at meetups, and you don't know where you're going to be six months from now, a year from now, or two years from now. You don't know if you're going to find your next business partner, your next friend, employee, employer, or even a client. I have a small caveat with client because I don't think anybody should go to a meetup to find a client. I think that can be a nice side effect, but I don't think you should go to a meetup to hunt down a client. Go and be genuine and participate, and the side effect will happen. And everybody, people can see through who's trying to be genuine and help, and who is there just to find some work. So I mentioned that we attend these meetups, but I think it's very important to share knowledge when you go to these meetups. I think everybody who attends a meetup should share their knowledge, their expertise, just by contributing to the conversation or by presenting in front of the group. Everybody in this room has an expertise, something they focus on, and can share that with the rest of the group. A meetup is a great place to find a mentor. So when you're looking for a mentor, I think you should find somebody who is doing what you want to be doing in the future, or is doing something that nicely complements what you do, and just ask them to help you. Most people would be happy to help mentor you in whatever you'd like if they're experienced in that topic. And I think the reason for that is, is because you become an asset to them. They can help you learn, and then they can bounce ideas and everything right back off of you, and get your difference of opinion on those topics. It also helps because they see, sometimes we're so deep in our work and in what we're doing, that we forget that there are things that are hard, and a new set of eyes on a problem can really give you a new perspective. So I think you should become a mentor. I think everybody should be a mentor. I think mentors learn just as much as student or mentee because of that new perception, that new set of eyes on the topic, their understanding of the topic. Many people get set in their processes, and they start to overlook or miss other steps. And a new set of eyes can say, what about this? What about that? And you learn, these are important things I've been missing them. Even though you're the more experienced in the relationship, the new mentee is teaching you. I think that you can be a mentor and a mentee at the same time. Let's say you're a small agency or a freelancer. And so you're building websites and your trade is development. But you're an agency, you're trying to operate a business. And so you find a mentor, and this mentor is helping you with business. They're helping you with the financials. While at the same exact time, you're being a mentor for another developer, teaching them your development skills. I think that having a mentor will get you, is the fast track to getting where you wanna go. And I think being a mentor is becoming the best at what you do. Because when you're a mentor, you get those other set of eyes on the problem. You learn more, you become stronger in what it is that you're already very experienced in. Pairing, this is a term used in programming a lot. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to pair program with someone quite a bit. And I learned some of the best code in my life during this time. I would write code, he would review it. He would send me his code, I would review it. Again, we're both capable of writing the code. We're both capable of reading it. But we just passed it back and forth, reviewed it. And it made us better programmers. I think that pair programming is applicable to anything, though. I think if you're a project manager, you can pass your processes by another project manager. I think you can pass your processes by another person. And I think you'll be better for it. So when you think about pair programming, you're pairing with anybody. You might not, your employer might not like this. So that might not happen. Because it's obviously, it's double the money because it's double the resources doing one amount of work. That's not necessarily true. But if they don't, that's fine. You can find someone at your meetup and work with them. Find someone who will work with you and you guys will review each other's code, your processes, and you'll both get stronger from it. So it's a friendly environment. This is a picture from a little meetup we have. But it's a really friendly environment at almost every WordPress meetup I've ever been to. Would anybody disagree? Okay, yeah, I think I've never been to one that I didn't think was entirely friendly and amazing. So the positive thing about this is you can get constructive feedback about the things that you're doing, your ideas, your processes. I think a lot of us have great ideas and we're scared to share them because we're scared of the feedback that we might get. And I think that in this friendly environment that is a WordPress meetup, you can get that feedback without it being destructive. It's positive but it's still feedback. And so you're getting better for this. Again, I think you should talk to the organizers. Organizers are just by default the most connected people in that community. So if you talk to them, they're going to help you find other people who can help you, who you can talk to, who you can talk about projects, who you can refer projects to, who you can get referred projects from, that kind of stuff. Organizers are a great resource. And organizers are not only involved in local meetups. I don't know that I've ever met an organizer that wasn't involved in a meetup and another thing and another thing. They just love giving. They love sharing everything everywhere they can. So you might say, we've been talking about meetups a lot but how does this make me better? How does this help me get more involved in the greater community? The community at large. And I just think it's the foundation. I think the local community is the foundation of everything that you can do in a greater community at a bigger scale. I think this is where you learn from other people who have done it and I think that it helps you learn the right ways to get involved in other places. So I also think that this is where you start to speak, you start to share your knowledge, you start to present in front of the small meetup. This is all in preparation to go share the greater scale at a meetup or at a word camp or another conference. I think everybody in this room has things that they can share, they have their expertise and I think they should share that while they're at a meetup or at a conference. So I think everybody here could apply to speak at a word camp. And but I wanna talk about a few reasons why you should not speak at a word camp, I think, before we talk about why you should. Spam, it's not just email, it's not only in a can. I see speakers once in a while and they're just, they're, I don't know, they're kind of talking about things that are very self-promotional or just a little gray, like not gray. And it's just, that's not why you should be speaking. You should be speaking because you genuinely wanna share with the community. Self-promotion. Name recognition is a nice side effect of being involved in a community, but you shouldn't be self-promoting. That's not, that shouldn't be your intent. Your intent should always be genuine to share your knowledge. So just don't be this guy. To sell a product, I see a lot of people who speak at a lot of different conferences, not necessarily word camps, but they get up and they start talking about a product that they built and you think you're about to hear a story about their experience. But what you end up hearing is a sales pitch at a conference where you're supposed to learn. And that's one reason I don't think, I don't think you should speak at a word camp if your intent is to sell your product. Or any other event, really. I think, unless that's the intent of the event. So now we have those out of the way. Those are just a few of the ones that I kind of bothered me. So let's talk about reasons why you should speak at a word camp. And I think we're gonna cover a few things we've already covered, but I think it's just to reiterate exactly how important it is. Sharing. I think everybody is hearing that I am saying sharing is important. Sharing your knowledge, showing other people your expertise isn't giving up your secret. It's bettering the community and it's bettering yourself. In Bluehost, we believe in this. I don't know if anybody recently heard we updated two and a half million WordPress sites. Right after that, we open sourced that script and gave it back to the community. And so any other hosting company, any other person can take that script and use it. We believe in giving back to the community. And I think that's really, really important because we could have kept it and we could have been the one who did that. But we didn't want to. We wanted to share it. We wanted to benefit everyone, benefit the greater community, even our competitors because it benefits the community. To educate, you've probably spent a long time figuring out something very specific about what you work on. A lot of research, a lot of hard hours and it can be hard to share that. But educating others about that saves them time. And again, it's the feedback. It's the communication loop. You're gonna learn even more from educating and sharing with others than keeping it all to yourself. Somebody else will come across that same research, that same knowledge and they'll probably share it. And so you might as well share it and just get the benefit of the communication loop. So I think everybody here should apply to speak at a WordCamp. How many people would be interested in speaking at a WordCamp or an event? There's a lot of hands. How many of you applied? A few, yeah. I think everybody should and I think everybody has things to share. Again, some of the next slides are just suggestions. They're not rules. But I think they help. A descriptive title. In your submission, I think you should have a descriptive title. I don't think you should have Link Bay type titles. I think it confuses attendees. I think it confuses organizers when they're reviewing your talk. I think if you're just concise and clearly describe what you're gonna present on, that's the best way. A summary, you may have a whole book of your thoughts but summarize it well, put an outline, mark what your intent to speak about is and mark what you want the audience's takeaways to be. When an organizer reads something like this, they see this person has thought it through. They know what the audience, they want the audience to take away. It's thoughtful and planned out. Again, back to the meetups. Being active locally, that's huge. Meeting those organizers and just being involved, getting that name recognition from just sharing is huge. WordCamps want local people to be speaking at their WordCamps. And a lot of times, those people are the same people who are presenting at local meetups who then speak at WordCamps. So if you need somewhere to start, start at your meetup. I really think it's the foundation of all of your future contributions to the community. Previous speaking experience, this one's a chicken and an egg, right? How do you get any speaking experience if you can't get accepted because you've never spoke? Again, it's not a rule, but it does help. Meetups count. So speak at the meetup. That's especially great if it's your local meetup, it's your local WordCamp because it's likely the same organizer. It's got a lot lower of a barrier to entry than a WordCamp. Just being local. WordCamps are a unique conference experience. I've been to a lot of conferences that are like annual type conferences. They're big names, but that's not important. I really love the WordCamp model that it's local and that we have WordCamps more than once a week. And so it's very focused on the local community. And so that gives local people the opportunity to speak, grow, share their knowledge because again, everybody has something to share. Having your slides prepared. I think making your slides and having even a rough draft of your slides when you submit your talk. Again, it shows preparation, it shows intent. This doesn't have to be polished by any means. It can just be titles on slides and this is your thought process. You're showing this to an organizer, a reviewer and I think that this goes a long way. So 100% of people have something to share. All of you have something to share. I wanna share a quote that I found really interesting. Everyone you meet knows something you don't. I think that's really true. Also, who doesn't like Bill Nye, right? So my takeaway or the message that I wanna give you is that everyone has something to share and you should apply to speak at a WordCamp, a meetup, any other conference. I think everyone has something to share. So thanks. Again, I'm Mike Hansen. You can find me on Twitter. And thank you. Do we have any question? I don't know any of the numbers for this event. I think you have a stronger chance locally but I think you should apply anywhere you're willing to go. No, that's not a requirement. I think it's a suggestion but it's not a requirement. Black, black shirt. I think when you're at the meetup, I don't think the first day you go to the meetup you should say, will you mentor me? I think you should find, get comfortable with the group, become an active member of that group and just find someone who you mesh well with and ask them, outright ask them, do you have the time to mentor me? I respect you and I would like to learn from you. I think it could be somebody who doesn't live here. I mean, email or Skype, for sure. Up top, start one. That's fine, I think try to attend one you can even if it's far away, just see how it goes and then I really think you should start your own. Fantastic. Yeah, there's a central foundation. They have a lot of guidelines. It's really great if your meetup group follows all those guidelines. To be frank, I would sum up, there's like four or five rules maybe, or guidelines and I would sum them up by don't be a jerk, that's the rules. So what we do in Utah with our meetup group is we had a monthly meetup and consistency was really important. Same day, same time, every month, same location, every month. Utah's a little strange because people live really far away. Sometimes we drive a long ways. So it was okay, people came from a long ways but recently we were, last year we were intending to grow our community intentionally. So we split off and we now have three locations and those other two locations are on different days but the same monthly thing, the same monthly schedule. These are just what we're doing. It's trial and error, try and see what happens. Absolutely, absolutely. So I work for Bluehost on the open source team and so we contribute back to WordPress in a lot of ways and Bluehost covers my travel to be here. Typically a good venue is somebody who's doing work in the WordPress space. There's probably a WordPress company or an agency who would love to host you. Any other questions? Right here in the front? Yeah, so how can he contribute as a business person versus a WordPress developer? And I think that that, I think the mentor relationship I described earlier, I think that you can benefit by helping a developer and I think a developer can benefit by helping you. You can, yeah, you can host a meetup if you're interested. Anybody is able to host a meetup. Any other questions? Right here. There's a lot of companies that are a for-profit and are good corporate citizens. I don't, I think that a lot of times if you see a business come in and start a work, or start a meetup and they, you just have to go and see how it goes, right? But also the non-profit section, a meetup's not really necessarily a non-profit, it's just a bunch of people getting together. It's volunteering. WordCamp Central, or the foundation, is a non-profit, so if you become a branch of that, you're part of that non-profit. All right, that's all I got.